Charlie Crist has a Cuba problem and a Cuban voter problem, a new Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald poll of Miami-Dade’s electorate shows.

Crist’s headline-grabbing announcement last month that he wants to travel to Cuba has hurt his standing more than it helped in Florida’s most-populous county, with only 5 percent of voters saying they’d be more likely to support him over the issue, while 24 percent say the opposite, according to the survey conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International.

A supermajority, 67 percent, say Crist’s Cuba position makes no difference in their vote between him and Gov. Rick Scott — and that’s despite the poll numbers showing voters by 51-40 percent say they favor Cuba travel for all residents of the United States.

But more people, business leaders and politicians are heading to Cuba these days – including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a consulting company that, over the past decade, has done $368,000 worth of web services for Scott, top Republican lawmakers and the Republican Party of Florida over the past decade.

“It was the trip of a lifetime, and we can’t wait to go back,” Sandi Poreda, senior public relations specialist at Taproot Creative wrote on its blog May 8, the day after Scott criticized his opponent's Cuba-travel plans.

Text of letter from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

Dear Mr. Donohue:

I understand that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will be leading a business delegation to Cuba next week. As you know, I have a strong interest in the freedom and well-being of the Cuban people. And because I have great respect for much of the U.S. Chamber’s work, I want to share my perspective about why I believe the Chamber’s trip is misguided and fraught with peril of becoming a propaganda coup for the Castro regime – to the detriment of America’s strategic interest in protecting human rights around the world, as well as the Cuban people.

As you attempt “to develop a better understanding of the country’s economic environment and the state of its private sector,” keep in mind that whatever new opportunities the regime claims to have made available to some Cubans, those opportunities are systematically denied to those who criticize and oppose the regime. Also consider the reality that no supposed economic change can be real or lasting since it can be unilaterally taken away at the regime’s discretion – without any independent judicial system to appeal to, and no way to seek meaningful policy changes through the political process, since free and fair elections are nonexistent in Cuba.

So Garcia said much more than these five words. But we're talking campaign season here. Little snippets like that make for good attack ads and mailers.

"This is an absurdity, accusing the son of Cuban immigrants of believing in Communism is just ridiculous," said Garcia, a freshman who sits in one of the state's most-competitive seats and therefore faces a horde of Republican challengers.

When asked if he could have phrased the line better, Garcia said there's no point: "They would post the video anyway.... I'll continue to say it."

America Rising sure hopes so. Here's his whole hangout riff:

“When you attract people, you are the dominant culture that people want to emulate and copy what you’re doing because it works. And in America, we are doing a huge disservice to ourselves by not understanding how powerful of a driver in the economy an immigration system that works can be -- and continues to be -- and by not having an immigration system that works. Let me give you an example, the kind of money we’ve poured in: So the most dangerous—sorry, the safest city in America is El Paso, Texas. It happens to be across the border from the most dangerous city in the Americas, which is Juarez. Right? And two of the safest cities in America, two of them are on the border with Mexico. And of course, the reason is we’ve proved that Communism works. If you give everybody a good, government job, there’s no crime. But that isn’t what we should be doing on the border. The kind of money we’ve poured into it, and we’re having diminishing returns. So while we’re doing—we’re spending all of this money here, we have border problems in Puerto Rico. We haven’t been able to set up a system that’s safe there. People are finding alternative routes. The opportunity to get this right and the mistake that Republicans make -- and I say Republicans because it’s Republicans right now -- I’m known to say that Democrats were also possessed by Xenophobia in 2008 and particularly after 9/11 and the economic crisis, but today we’re in a much better place as a party. And the problem that Republicans have is that they’re fighting a battle they cannot win.”

Note: El Paso is one of the safest big cities in the U.S. (not the safest city of any size) and it looks like San Pedro Sula, Honduras is more dangerous than Juarez.

Charlie Crist's Plantation field office opening was a smashing success, with amped up crowds of supporters and controlled conditions.

The Little Havana field office opening on Saturday? Not so much.

Any outside event in Miami is prone to be disrupted by protesters. That's the reason Gov. Rick Scott last week campaigned inside a car dealership. The Democrats outside couldn't be heard.

But Crist's staff decided to hold a media event outside. Republican protestors, many fired up over Crist's anti-embargo stance, made him pay for it, as a video from the conservative Shark Tank Blog shows.

"Shame on you! Shame on you!" they chanted, drowning out one speaker.

Crist had to take the mic and lead his supporters to chant back: "We love you! We love you!"

It's a nice message. But that's not Crist's campaign message.

Later, Crist campaign manager Omar Khan, addressed the crowd.

"We're not really going to be distracted by them," Khan said. "They can keep on screaming."

Well, they did. And when you and your candidate stop your speech, that's the definition of getting distracted.

"There's going to be a lot of noise," Khan said. "And the biggest amount of noise -- I wish this was going to be our biggest problem. It's not. It's going to be $100 million they spend on us."

On hand for the Republicans: former Congressman and Cuban exile leader Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

“Charlie Crist should realize that some things need to be above politics,” Diaz-Balart said in a statement. “There is too much human suffering involved for Crist to use Cuba in his search for attention. His most recent comments about Cuba reveal a shallowness which is truly shocking. His nonchalant attitude on Cuba is callous and embarrassing.”

But the likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee wants to visit Florida's communist neighbor this summer and says it's past time to lift the United States' 53-year-old Cuba trade embargo.

"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. This policy has not worked," Crist told the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald in an interview Friday, explaining for the first time the thinking behind his plans.

The controversial trip — panned by Republican Gov. Rick Scott as a public relations coup for the Castro regime — would be a first for such a high-profile Florida candidate, and it may not happen at all if the Department of State or Cuban government reject the idea. The former Republican governor said he is optimistic after submitting his request to the Department of State two weeks ago.

In a move that would have been unthinkable for any statewide Florida candidate just a few years ago, Charlie Crist is planning to visit Cuba this summer.

Nothing is final, but the Democratic candidate for governor is eager to learn more about Cuba as he calls for normalizing relations with the island 90 miles south of Key West.

“We ought to think big. We ought to lift the embargo on Cuba and work with the president and get things done,” Crist said earlier this week during a visit to the Versailles Restaurant in Miami, where he didn’t disclose that he’s considering a visit to the island.

The Little Havana landmark, a frequent Republican campaign spot and exile gathering place, is the last place where you would expect to hear soft-on-embargo positions.

Crist, too, used to support the embargo and backed it as late as 2010 in his failed U.S. Senate bid as a Republican.

Crist’s new position — the latest in a string of reversals — was instantly panned by Republican Gov. Rick Scott and his newly appointed lieutenant governor, Carlos Lopez-Cantera.

“He’s been a Republican. He has been an independent and a Democrat,” Lopez-Cantera said at a campaign stop Wednesday in Miami. “There’s one party left in Cuba that maybe he’s considering switching to: the Communist Party.”

“It just shows Charlie’s ignorance on the issue of Cuba,” Lopez-Cantera said, adding that that his “family lost everything” and that his grandmother’s brothers were imprisoned by the Castro regime.

Scott said Crist would be a “puppet” of the Castro regime and would help enrich it simply by traveling there.

The Associated Press' report Thursday that the U.S. Agency for International Development financed the creation of a Twitter-style social network in Cuba to stir unrest raised fundamental foreign-policy questions, The Miami Herald's Juan O. Tamayo writes:

Does the U.S. government have the right to circumvent a dictatorship’s controls on information? And if Washington tries to help foster democracy in a country ruled by a dictator, is it pushing for “regime change?”

[...]

Replies predictably ranged from a rotund no to a flat yes, largely reflecting the divisions over U.S. policies on Cuba and the more than half-century of animosity between the two nations.

Among those to weigh in were Miami Cuban-Americans in Congress, who generally said USAID's programs are needed, according to reactions compiled by the AP. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, told a Spanish-language reporter in Washington D.C. that the Twitter-like program was "justifiable," as reported by our colleagues at the Buzz.

Every now and then, amid all the spam and junk from angry partisans and lunatics, there comes a thoughtful email from a reader that makes a reporter just happy he's doing his job. So I reached out to the sender (a 23-year-old Miami Republican who votes the party line) and decided to just post his study and his entire note (plus my added hypertext) below:

My name is Andrew N. Estevez, I just graduated in 2013 from the University of Miami with a Master's in International Business Administration. Your article on the front pages of the Friday Herald really struck a chord with me; not only because I am born of Cuban parents and have a Venezuelan girlfriend who passionately participates in all the Miami rallies for change in Venezuela, but also because, in my final semester at UM, I wrote a research paper analyzing the ineffectiveness of the United States' embargo on Cuba.

My paper is entitled Insanity. On the second page there is a quote from Albert Einstein that reads:"Insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

The U.S. Senator from Florida had listened patiently to Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa speak favorably about his recent trip to Cuba, all the while omitting any real references to the oppression of the totalitarian government there.

To Rubio, like many Cuban exiles and their descendants, it was too much to bear.

“Let me tell you what the Cubans are really good at,” Rubio said Monday when he took to the Senate floor. “What they are really good at is repression…They have exported repression in real time, in our hemisphere, right now.”

This wasn’t some Cold War-era fulmination about Castro’s regime.

Rubio’s speech was about current events: the protests in Venezuela, the Maduro government and the ties it has with the Castros, who repress their own people and helped inspire the suppression in Caracas.